oddhammer

I was mucking about on about 4 or 5 different things at once and ended up back at this post. I was really curious about what the "Godfathers" of Flash were up to when I read that post over a year ago, and it seems like the question has been answered and I apparently missed it.

So here's what they've been up to..

"The Greenbox™ Home Energy Manager empowers homeowners to understand and manage their energy consumption. With knowledge of their energy use, consumers can take proactive steps to conserve energy, understand their impact on the environment, and save money.

Conveniently monitoring electricity, water, and/or gas usage in real-time, the Greenbox provides direct feedback to consumers about their homes performance. Studies have shown that households can reduce their utility bills by 10-20%, just by being aware of their ongoing usage.

The Greenbox presents easy to understand graphs, charts, historical data, and community comparisons to empower people to understand and make informed decisions about their energy and water usage. A personalized recommendation engine takes the mystery out of making your home more efficient by forecasting usage, cost, and emissions savings that can be created by implementing various efficiency improvements."

That's something that just might come in handy as a barrel of oil topped $123 today and other types of energy are slowly creeping up in cost.

Now I'm curious if they're using Flash for that device and if consumer devices like this are the reason Adobe moved to open (free) the licensing for the Flash Player recently. I figured it was for flashy fun things like set top boxes, handheld games (leapster), etc. and not necessarily for utilitarian devices like an energy management system. I guess I figured wrong.

wow..... the announcement today from Adobe about opening the Flash Player up to the market to be placed on any imaginable device is just stunning. This is going to place even more demand on people with Flash skills as these companies begin to produce handheld devices using the Flash Player.

The only thing in the press release that set off my BS detector was this.. "“The Open Screen Project will make it simple for Verizon and our partners to deliver rich mobile experiences to more devices,”" .. yeah, and how big of a fee will they charge developers before they can develop for the Verizon network?

I also noticed that there was no mention of Apple in that press release.

I saw the recent post about the XSS vulnerability if a SWF was published from an old application (old news..).. here.. and it reminded me that a while back I was looking for a way to read the SWF metadata from within the SWF. I can't go into why.. but at the time I couldn't find a way to do it. I'm sure it could be hacked pretty easily but didn't see a direct and easy way to do it.

Metadata can be read from the SWF header by a web server serving up the SWF by using PHP, ColdFusion, .NET, etc.. , and you could also have some JavaScript that pokes at the meatadata in any SWFs coming from 3rd parties.. it can be handy. The metadata can also be set via JSFL..

So I looked at the docs on metadata and it looked promising..

but the metaData returned from the document when I checked it from JSFL was: "XML Metadata is :<rdf:RDF xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#"><rdf:Description rdf:about="" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"><dc:title>my dinky little title</dc:title><dc:description>some super important description</rdf:Description>"

The examples in the docs also show CreateDate and CreatorTool.. hmm.
<xmp:CreateDate>2004-10-12T10:29-07:00</xmp:CreateDate>
<xmp:CreatorTool>Flash Authoring WIN 8,0,0,215</xmp:CreatorTool>

which might be of interest.. hmm.. I might have to spend some time looking into reading the header of a SWF again and see what turns up. Maybe somebody has already figured this one out and I just haven't searched around enough.

The other day (when I was finally getting out of a month or so of fog..) I wrote kind of (heh..) a rambling post and I got a couple of IMs from Phillip Kerman encouraging me to do "why" videos for a little therapy.

lol.. yep. I'd looked at his "why" vids a while ago and laughed so hard I almost stomped on my dog (you know.. laughing, stomping feet, dog right at my feet.. ah.. nm) and so I listened to him. I don't think I have the time each day to devote to making the vids like he did, but I had a few minutes to go and watch his and laugh a bit and it made me feel better.

He's poking some pretty good fun at/with Adobe with things like .. Why is the old Captivate logo gone? and Max Dates are set!. He's ended his "why flash" focused videos (for the moment I bet..) and started to focus on some more serious content. Here, go take a look at his latest ones from yesterday: Why SEO (Search Engine Optimization)? and stock photography.

He made me laugh.. and gave me something to blog about.. that's good therapy, yep. It ranks up there with watching sparks fly from grinding steel or maybe the smell of .. ah.. fresh Diesel.